How to Build Risk into Your Business Model

How to Build Risk into Your Business Model

Source：Harvard Business Review May 2011 page.100-105

Authors：Karan Girotra & Serguei Netessine

重點摘要與個人評論如下：

 

So what’s the secret?

How can companies systematically innovate their business models?

How can executives identify and quantify the value of their changes?

We believe that the literature on business model innovation has overlooked a critical driver of value: where in the value chain the risks associated with creating, supplying, and consuming products and services reside. In designing their value chains, companies typically focus on three things: revenue (price, market size, and ancillary sales), cost structure (direct and indirect costs, economies of scale and scope), and resource velocity (the rate at which value is created from the applied resources, typically captured through lead times, throughput, inventory turns, and asset utilization).

區分以下兩大面向：

一、降低風險

Reducing Risks

Often companies that have lowered their business model risk have done so by delaying production commitments, transferring risk to other parties, or improving the quality of their information.

1.1 Delaying production commitments.

這裡作者舉的是Zara的例子(Zara模式已經成為新一代的零售的典範，意者可自行Google)

1.2 Rewriting your contracts.

以LiveOps & Blockbuster為例，說明一些在合約制定上降低營運槓桿風險的技巧

1.3 Gathering better data.

觀念是提前預測與掌握供需變化，減小供應鏈當中長鞭效應的衝擊

二、增加風險

Adding Risk

舉的例子是：

In the 1970s, Rolls-Royce started offering the airlines a very different service contract: “Power by the hour.” The airlines would pay Rolls-Royce for an engine’s flight hours rather than for repair time and materials. Of course, much of the risk reduction the airlines obtained was reflected in the price, but transferring the risk had a more profound effect: Rolls-Royce was motivated to improve its products and maintenance processes, because the fewer the problems and the quicker the fixes, the more the manufacturer got paid. The airlines could never have created value in this way, either on their own or by prodding Rolls-Royce, so the new contract triggered a completely new value creation dynamic.

這個例子不算太過激進與革命，以環工的領域而言

一些純水或廢水設備的製造商，也已經跨足代操作的領域，不但可以幫客戶降低營運成本，又可以讓自己公司增加營收；而關鍵就在於客戶端的人員對於那些濾材或相關設施，往往不夠專業，所以通常會採取預防保養的方式進行維護（還沒壞就先更換），而這些製造商，對於這些材料與器材的壽命和耐受程度的知識當然比客戶豐富，所以相對的比較敢(操到極限)，自然就有了利潤空間….。也就是所謂的承擔和增加風險。

Advantages and Challenges

You might think that such innovations aren’t a sustainable form of competitive advantage. But experience shows that they actually can be, because copying someone else’s business model innovation often involves changing processes that are embedded in the culture of an organization—and substantially changing the cultural DNA is harder than adopting a new technology or design or entering a new market.

作者舉的例子是Toyota的TPS，但這跟前面提的風險導向的企業創新，似乎是兩碼子事

The lesson: If you really want to steal a march on your rivals, shift some of the focus that you now put on improving your products and services to thinking about how you, your suppliers, and your customers can manage the risks of the business you conduct together.

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個人感想

覺得HBR的這篇文章沒什麼，理由如下：

1. 以上觀念不過是common sense（對於知悉生產管理實務與相關理論的讀者而言）
2. 其次以這篇文章的立論來看，大概focus在生產與營運的面向（沒看到著墨於策略等其他類型的風險）
3. 硬把risk management 套入business innovation （把裡面的一些案例公司的成功套用這個架構來解釋，過分簡化）
4. 感覺風險管理的好壞只是”果”，而非企業創新的”因”；換言之，這篇文章的邏輯犯了倒果為因的毛病
5. 這樣唬濫談觀念，就可以刊登在HBR上，那或許我也可以用太極陰陽相生相剋的梗，闡述企業風險管理的成敗因素投稿了。